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Learn OCaml

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203 points smartmic | 5 comments | 27 Jun 25 20:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.728s | source
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luxurytent ◴[27 Jun 25 23:29 UTC] No.44401227[source]▶
If I learned OCaml, what type of prospects would I have?

Fairly seasoned generalist, mostly writing Go these days. Lots of plumbing with LLMs etc.

Would love to learn something new but am driven by a goal in mind (ie OCaml exposes me to "X industry")

Is that a thing?

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Rendello ◴[27 Jun 25 23:52 UTC] No.44401337[source]▶
The trading firm Jane Street is the big OCaml shop, they have a great podcast about all their tech. Each episode is someone from a team talking about the tool they've built, and their whole ecosystem is pretty much bespoke OCaml tooling.

- https://signalsandthreads.com/

(It's one of three programming podcasts I consistently listen to these days, the others being On The Metal and Developer Voices.)

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1. xedrac ◴[28 Jun 25 02:31 UTC] No.44401959[source]▶
Bespoke tooling makes me think that the standard tooling is lacking. How does it compare to Rust's tooling?
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2. mbac32768 ◴[28 Jun 25 02:48 UTC] No.44402015[source]▶
lol

imagine everything that's good about Rust tooling but significantly less good or non-existent instead

(the VS Code plugin for OCaml is actually decent though)

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3. yawaramin ◴[28 Jun 25 03:48 UTC] No.44402190[source]▶
The VS Code plugin is, like, 90% of the developer experience of most devs. The fact that it's rock-solid in OCaml should automatically bump us up to at least a B grade. Meanwhile the dune build system is powerful and flexible, and compile times are actually blazing fast, unlike Rust's famous slow builds. So yeah, there are pros and cons on each side, I wouldn't say it's a clear win.
4. no_wizard ◴[28 Jun 25 13:50 UTC] No.44404692[source]▶
The article isn’t a very technical one. I’d wager when they say tooling they mean any in house program they use as a tool, as opposed to what we as programmers would think of, like compilers, dev tools etc.

Ocaml has a pretty robust ecosystem of good dev tools and build tools.

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5. Rendello ◴[28 Jun 25 21:04 UTC] No.44408198[source]▶
If you're talking about me (GP), I meant that Jane Street has built an entire ecosystem around OCaml, from their customer-facing and backend software to traditional OCaml tooling (like build systems). That being said, all I know is from the podcast I linked. I haven't touched OCaml (yet?) myself.